Measuring Global Macroeconomic Uncertainty and Cross-Country Uncertainty Spillovers

We propose an approach for jointly measuring global macroeconomic uncertainty and bilateral spillovers of uncertainty between countries using a global vector autoregressive (GVAR) model. Over the period 2000Q1–2020Q4, our global index is able to summarize a variety of uncertainty measures, such as financial-market volatility, economic-policy uncertainty, survey-forecast-based measures and econometric measures of macroeconomic uncertainty, showing major peaks during both the global financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic. Global spillover effects are quantified through a novel GVAR-based decomposition of country-level uncertainty into the contributions from all countries in the global model. We show that this approach produces estimates of uncertainty spillovers which are strongly related to the structure of the global economy.